Maryland: Colorless Conjugality

Maryland (the "Free State"),
which adopted the nation's first antimiscegenation statute in 1661 to
keep white women servants from marrying Negro slaves, also passed one
of the nation's last such laws in 1935. Aimed at preventing Filipino
mess boys at the Naval Academy in Annapolis from taking all-too-willing
local brides, it bars marriage of either whites or Negroes with "a
member of the Malay race." So, when Jo Ann Kovacs, 25, a white
Baltimore nurse, and Meki Toalepai, 26, a handsome
singer-dancer-musician from Western Samoa, applied for a marriage
license in Baltimore this month, they were refused. Maryland, the
unhappy...